


Behind this reality

by shai



Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, for very crisis-situation values of the word life, imposter syndrome, kinda slice of life, scenes from the oldest house, spoilers through the mission in the Panopticon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:15:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22108462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shai/pseuds/shai
Summary: Jesse stares down a picture of herself. Not a photo, a painting. The painted Jesse has a solemn expression, an American flag behind her, hair in a practical ponytail. "And they told me I'd never amount to anything."She shakes her head, sets off at a comfortable jog back towards Pope's hideout.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 53





	Behind this reality

Jesse stares down a picture of herself. Not a photo, a painting. The painted Jesse has a solemn expression, an American flag behind her, hair in a practical ponytail. "And they told me I'd never amount to anything."

She shakes her head, sets off at a comfortable jog back towards Pope's hideout.

* * *

Jesse had always been a capable, practical kind of person, even before a decade or so of breaking and entering and otherwise investigating on the hunt for Dylan.

It still hadn't quite prepared her for the Oldest House in lockdown, though. She'd never fired a gun before picking up this so-called Service Weapon. She'd been shot at, but never been hit until these Hiss creatures got her in the thigh on her way out from this dead Director's office.

She limps over to the little marked-out zone Polaris is pointing her at, trying not to put weight on the wounded leg for any longer than necessary. Hopefully one of these safe rooms has a first aid kit. If she's lucky, maybe there'll even be a first aider with both feet on the ground.

Polaris wants her to - do something with the little hexagon of duct tape on the ground. She isn't quite sure what, but the ripples around it look indicate to put her attention there, focus. Jesse reaches out towards it, then feels a kind of - click, like a gear slotting into place, her mind locking into something that feels like a tug of war over control of this intangible chunk of this weirdass possessed office block. She couldn't describe in words what she's using to pick that fight: it's a bit like the way Polaris feels in her mind, if Polaris had been a skin-crawling horror like all those haunted people drifting through the air.

She doesn't understand it, but she puts some kind of intangible force behind it, and Polaris steers that force, and they wins. It's a rush, to win some kinda fight with her mind - Jesse grins in triumph, then drops to her knees as she realises how overbalanced her body's gotten while she waged a mental battle.

It's all real, she thinks. The disaster, its supernatural cause. The secretive agency that took Dylan.

It's real and it could kill me.

But at least I won't die wondering.

* * *

Funny thing about the situation here: when she hears a gunfight in the Oldest House, Jesse's started feeling excited. Instead of some kind of rational reaction ("oh fuck, someone's in trouble!", "geez, how many armed guards does the secret government agency have?" etc) she hears shots and thinks: sweet, someone else must be fighting the Hiss!

This time it's two guards and one labcoat-wearing researcher gamely trying to cover one another's retreat in the face of a bunch of Hissed rangers and one of those flying telekinetic ones. No big deal. She creeps up from the side and conks the flying one with a typewriter, and the nearer of the two guards obligingly shoots it out of the air as it spins tail over teakettle.

They mop up the situation pretty efficiently with the biggest threat down, and one of the guards says "Thanks for the save. Thought you needed one of these HRAs to be out and about in the situation, though."

The researcher stands up from behind a desk. She's holding a pistol, but Jesse wouldn't trust her to shoot it - you can see her hands shaking from ten foot away. "Yes. That's consistent with my research. I'm - it seems like the entity infects people through some kind of resonance. Though we'll need to collect some of Darling's notes to understand the exact mechanism."

Jesse nods. "Emily Pope's been gathering his research together from Central Executive. I'm gathering people to help out."

The other guard scoots over, standing so upright he looks like he's been starched: "It's an honour to meet you, Ma'am Mrs Director Sir!"

Jesse blinks, not really sure how to react. He salutes her, as if the communication problem she's having might be because there's not been _enough_ formality yet: "I saw your portrait, ma'am."

Thanks, Oldest House. Jesse thinks, slightly hysterically. Saving me ever introducing myself as anyone's boss. Though on the other hand, it's the damn place that's put her in this situation in the first place.

Jesse isn't a boss kind of a person. She's happy to lend a hand in a crisis situation, or give someone a bollocking for screwing up, but, well - once the dust's settled here, she couldn't do any of the stuff Trench's memos talk about, and she wouldn't want to even if she could. She's not sure yet how to make a big floating pyramid that's also a big ugly concrete building hash out an interdepartmental transfer, but she'll figure it out. Show up in its featureless plane and form a one-woman picket line. Drop a memo asking for a meeting off down the bottomless pits under the firebreaks. Ask if Pope knows how to change the answerphone message on the Hotline phone, maybe.

There's still one very earnest guard staring at her a little too intensely. The other two are looking between her and him, probably wondering if the Hiss throwing shit around with mind powers had conked him on the skull.

"Just Jesse is fine." She goes with, in the hopes that'll do to acknowledge her Directoriality without making any kind of big deal of it. "I showed up here looking for answers and it didn't go quite how I expected. Look, are any of you hurt?"

She ends up escorting the little trio back to Central Executive - Pope seemed like she could do with a fellow upbeat nerd to go with her various minions, and Jesse was headed that way anyway. The researcher asks what answers she had been looking for, and Jesse finds herself vaguely mentioning Dylan.

"So wait, you just walked in while this was all going down?"

"Yup, pretty much."

"Then... found Director Trench's body and picked up the murder weapon?"

Well, before that Ahti had told her she was late for a job interview. But that gets in the way of a neat story.

"No-one's ever accused me of staying out of trouble."

"The Service Weapon, it..." the scientist struggles to find words.

"Could have killed me?" Jesse prompts.

She nods.

"Well, glad you made it to come dig us out of trouble."

* * *

They all call her Director except Ahti.

That's only part of why he sets her at ease, why she's happy to pick up odd jobs from him even while the Hiss siege keeps on killing people. Anyone who spends a minute thinking about it will realise it's the janitors who know a place best. Someone who's been working at a job long enough to grumble about it with the familiarity he's got is a guy who'll have learnt its secret passageways and made copies of all the keys.

Sure, that'd be a stranger, bigger job here than elsewhere. But Ahti doesn't seem like a guy to be put off by interdimensional hotels or doors opening out onto an infinite void.

He seems like the only one who sees clearly enough to realise she couldn't be some kind of - important businessperson, even one elected by a giant floating pyramid.

It's silly, but she doesn't want to outright ask what he does know.

* * *

"No, the reason the Director came back was to check on progress for the investigation into the Hiss specimen. She's a busy woman, I know the jukebox is urgent but I think her focus will stay on the immediate threat for the time being." Emily Pope says, businesslike.

What she's saying isn't quite true. Jesse came back to stare deep into her brother's eyes and hear about the hallucinations he's calling dreams until she couldn't face it any more, and now she's done that she's using her Board-and-Benicoff-TV-given right to float to let her hide above Central Executive reading through all the most sinister looking Bureau paperwork she could find to once more try and figure out if she can trust a single thing they tell her.

She'd be delighted if the Bureau scientists could come through with something useful, but their track record so far doesn't look great.

Unusual for the excitable researcher to be outside the Board Room for long enough for anyone to pin her down, though. Must be something to do with Dylan. Jesse peers over to see who she's talking to, and sees that guy from the Panopticon, walking away in a bit of a flap.

Emily Pope looks up, running fingers through her short hair, just as Jesse's peering out. Her eyes go wide, but she looks around and waits for the Panopticon guy to leave before whispering "Jesse? What are you doing up there?"

Jesse rolls off the big concrete support she's been curled up on, lets herself drop, then catches her own weight and drifts the last foot down. 

Emily actually raises both hands to her mouth, eyes wide with appreciation at this new trick. Jesse's never seen anyone make that face before in real life.

She holds up the clipboard she's been using to store Greatest Hits Of The FBC: "Just some light reading. What does NSC stand for?"

Pope shrugs. "It's the power plant - down in maintenance. I've heard whenever they tried to set up utilities to the Oldest House, it'd get cut off without warning after a couple months. And y'know. With the kind of things here, it makes sense to have backup power regardless."

"Sure. But what does it stand for?"

It's a question that's not just a question. Jesse doesn't like the idea of setting out to test someone like that, to give them a quiz with right and wrong answers. But what she wants to know is important - do you know the sins of your forebears? Is my brother safe with you in charge of Research, or does the way the Bureau thinks make _everyone_ see interestingly weird people as either prisoners or tools?

She won't notice the significance of that thought until much later: while she was protecting the FBC from the Hiss it seemed ridicuous for them to all think she should be in charge, but noticing other people might protecting from the FBC tipped her over without her really noticing.

**Author's Note:**

> I like this game and bring its fandom a little Jesse character study as tribute.
> 
> all Dylan's dreams are delightful; all the decisions Jesse makes about how to introduce herself to new people are so deliberate - I think the only time she claims the title director unprompted is when going to the Panopticon to demand answers?
> 
> (As far as I can see the document pickup I had in mind for Jesse to be prying about hasn't been transcribed online yet afaics, oops. Oh well, if you can't write stories whose conclusion depends on an obscure piece of background world-detail in fanfiction, where can you? Reddit gets across the general idea here: https://www.reddit.com/r/controlgame/comments/cy2k8k/the_nsc_power_source_big_spoiler/
> 
> (I found a good sinister doc about the "[REDACTED] Sarcophagus Chamber" and how they needed to build version #2 to stop the subject using parautilitarian translocative abilities on its casing that I found before going to check what the [REDACTED] there stood form, so it stuck in my mind at the same time as all the v well-written Jesse&Dylan childhood stuff. FBC, you are, if not *the* bad guys, definitely not the good guys.)


End file.
